The UK internet sucks. This is why.

    At the end of the day it's always going to be a massive, expensive, long-winded process to move BT to fibre due to the crazy scale of their network — some areas are going to get it first no matter what. This is just a way of doing it based on demand, which I can't see a problem with.

    I'm not really excited about Infinity anyway as not all homes will be getting a direct 100mb/s fibre — many if not most will only have fibre to their street, with a top speed of 40mb/s and a cap of 20GB. That's not even as good as Virgin's already-available 50mb/s fibre, and Virgin is rolling out 100mb/s as we speak.

    Quote from Thrik

    At the end of the day it's always going to be a massive, expensive, long-winded process to move BT to fibre due to the crazy scale of their network — some areas are going to get it first no matter what. This is just a way of doing it based on demand, which I can't see a problem with.I'm not really excited about Infinity anyway as not all homes will be getting a direct 100mb/s fibre — many if not most will only have fibre to their street, with a top speed of 40mb/s and a cap of 20GB. That's not even as good as Virgin's already-available 50mb/s fibre, and Virgin is rolling out 100mb/s as we speak.

    It's just really pants. We're one of the leading countries in the world and we're in the dark age of internet. I have had to settle for my entire internet life on a crap 3mb connection with a cap. Just stone age rubbish. And as for demand, it's in demand everywhere; everyone wants faster internet so why bother with silly votes. It is a big investment but one worth the money and effort completely.

    Yeah, it's pretty lame but we're not doing that badly — the US is at least as bad as us and they're pretty much internet central. The problem is the old copper phone networks were laid out long ago in these countries, so taking all that out and replacing them with fibre is an insanely costly thing to do. And we're not talking a few million here, we're talking something in the region of £15 billion last time I checked. That's a serious problem even for a company as massive as BT.

    Some other countries are much better off because their lines were laid down more recently and they had the foresight to use fibre knowing it'd eventually pay off, just like Virgin/NTL/Diamond Cable/whatever laid out fibre across much of the UK in the 90s (which is already available and capable of doing at least 100mb/s). The reason the UK/US progress has been slow is because we already have a fully functioning phone/broadband network and it's simply an upgrade, and also there wasn't enough competition in the past forcing BT to do it quickly. Of course that's changed now the internet has continued to boom and Virgin has started threatening BT by actually making proper use of its fibre network.

    But yes, again it sucks. I'm stuck on 8mb/s in the centre of Nottingham right now, despite being on a fairly luxurious 20mb/s in my previous small town of Mansfield.

    Quote from Thrik

    Yeah, it's pretty lame but we're not doing that badly — the US is at least as bad as us and they're pretty much internet central. The problem is the old copper phone networks were laid out long ago in these countries, so taking all that out and replacing them with fibre is an insanely costly thing to do. And we're not talking a few million here, we're talking something in the region of £15 billion last time I checked. That's a serious problem even for a company as massive as BT.Some other countries are much better off because their lines were laid down more recently and they had the foresight to use fibre knowing it'd eventually pay off, just like Virgin/NTL/Diamond Cable/whatever laid out fibre across much of the UK in the 90s (which is already available and capable of doing at least 100mb/s). The reason the UK/US progress has been slow is because we already have a fully functioning phone/broadband network and it's simply an upgrade, and also there wasn't enough competition in the past forcing BT to do it quickly. Of course that's changed now the internet has continued to boom and Virgin has started threatening BT by actually making proper use of its fibre network.

    But yes, again it sucks. I'm stuck on 8mb/s in the centre of Nottingham right now, despite being on a fairly luxurious 20mb/s in my previous small town of Mansfield.

    Aye. I'm just frustrated at all of this due to my reliance on my small connection. Of course it's easy for me to say "OMG UPGRADE IT ALL" when that really isn't the simple option, but what alternative is there, really.

    Be* are indeed good, it's with them that I had my 20mb/s connection in Mansfield and they have no kind of capping. Unfortunately their coverage is limited and I can't get it in the absolute centre of Nottingham.

    TalkTalk are good too, offering up to 24mb/s just like Be*. They also have very relaxed capping and are willing to change your settings on their end to produce optimal gaming latency, etc.

    Of course they all use BT's network apart from Virgin who have their own fibre infrastructure in place, so whether or not you can get anywhere near 24mb/s is questionable. Depends entirely upon your distance from their exchanges.

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